This is what this article is NOT about: it's not about forbidding a willing child to sit on Granny's knee, or giving Grandpa a kiss, or cuddling Auntie Kate. It's not about being overly politically correct or trying to stop normal family life.
What it is about is this: children have powerful instincts, and sometimes adults override those instincts for social niceties that suit the adult, not the child. Sometimes children don't want to kiss a relative or family friend, for all sorts of reasons, and yet adults want them to because otherwise it doesn't look nice, or seem polite. In being coerced to kiss or cuddle someone they don't want to, that child is being told that how they feel, what they want to do with their own bodies, doesn't really matter. That an adult's wishes and sensibilities matter more.
And it's a more pernicious action than you might think. If a child gets used to being told their bodies aren't their own, or have no right of refusal, even in something as innocent as kissing grandma, when or if there is malintent from another adult they may not feel strong enough to say no. How are children magically supposed to learn that lesson? You cannot expect a child to acquiesce when you want them to, and then magically grow up to "know their own mind". Knowing their own mind starts with allowing them to speak it.
Lucy Emmerson, co-ordinator of the Sex Education Forum, recently echoed this, to much criticism. In the January of The Sex Education Supplement: the Consent Issue, Emmerson said that she was disappointed to learn that three out of 10 young people did not learn about consent at school; not about the age of consent being 16 – most knew that – but "about real-life situations and what you would do if 'something happens'".
Emmerson believes that learning about consent starts from age zero. "Much is learned by young children from everyday experiences about whether or not their opinion is valued, and if they have any control over physical contact with others."
Further along in the online magazine, which is aimed at teachers and professionals, there are lesson ideas. In those for key stage 1, ideas are given to prompt thoughts in children "about consent and physical touch … for example whether or not we want to kiss a friend or relative or hug someone". And it gives tips on how to answer questions such as "when is it OK to let someone touch me?" and "how can I say no if I don't want someone to touch me?" For those interested, it recommends a book called A Kiss Like This by Laurence and Catherine Anholt.
How anyone can disagree with this puzzles me. The criticism levied at Emmerson is that it's "political correctness gone mad". How? How is teaching a child that they have control over their bodies and who they have close physical contact with, a bad thing? Another criticism is that it erodes family life. Isn't a child a member of that family? Its most vulnerable member? No one is stopping a child jumping on anyone's knee and giving them a kiss if they want to. But if they don't? Isn't that OK too?
"Children," says Peter Saunders, chief executive of the National Association for People Abused in Childhood, "should never be forced to do anything which makes them uncomfortable around these issues. Children are instinctive and intuitive around people they are not comfortable with. And we need to respect that."
"There are certain things we make children do which is quite different," says Saunders. "We make them brush their teeth, for example. That is quite different to forcing them to kiss an uncle they don't want to. It's about boundaries. And this blurring of boundaries [by forcing them to kiss someone they don't want to] can indeed blur their understanding of what is right and wrong, about their body belonging to them."
Your child may not want to kiss Grandma/pa for no other reason than they don't feel like it that day. But one day, they may have a very real instinct about someone. You can't have it both ways. If an adult gets offended because a child doesn't kiss them or want to be near them, then really it's up to the adult to address these feelings of abandonment, not the child to make it better.
What do you think? If your child doesn't want to give a relative a kiss, do you make them?
